It had been red and fast, and Roderick remembered it as clearly as if he had seen it yesterday. It would dive, trying to hit Rex’s head, and then the override would say, “My gosh, that’s a great big dinosaur! You’re trying to crash us into a great big dinosaur, you jerk!” The override would pull the aircar up and miss, and then it would give it back to the driver, and he would try the same thing all over.
Roderick had followed it with his eyes, especially after Rex started snapping at it, and the sky had been a wonderful cool blue with little white surgical-ball clouds strolling around in it. He had never seen a better sky—and he never would, because skies did not get any better than that one. After a while he had spotted the channel copter, flying around up there and taking his picture to run on everybody’s threedeevid, and had made faces at it.
Another child, a scrubbed little girl with long, straight, privileged-looking yellow hair, had her hand up. “Did he kill a whole lot of people?”
The teaching cyborg interrupted her own lecture. “Certainly not, since there were no people in North America during the Upper Cretaceous. Human evolution did not begin—”
“This one.” The scrubbed little girl pointed to Rex. “Did he?”
Rex shook his head.
“That was not the point at issue,” the teaching cyborg explained. “Disruption is disrupting, and he and his maker disrupted. He disrupted, I should say, and his maker still more, since Rex would not have been in existence to disrupt had he not been made in violation of societal standards. No one of sensitivity would have done what he did. Someone of sensitivity would have realized at once that their construction of a large dinosaur, however muted in coloration—”
Rex interrupted her. “I’m purple. It’s just that it’s gotten sort of dull lookin’ now that I’m older. Looky here.” He bent and slapped at his water trough with his disproportionately small hands. Dust ran from his hide in dark streaks, leaving it a faded mulberry.
“You are not purple,” the teaching cyborg admonished Rex, “and you should not say you are. I would describe that shade as a mauve.” She spoke to her female attendant. “Do you think that they would mind very much if I were to start over? I’ve lost my place, I fear.”
“You mustn’t interrupt her,” the female attendant cautioned the little girl. “Early Tertiary-in-the-Upper-Eocene-was-the-Moeritherium-the-size-of-a-tuber-but-more-like-a-hippopotamus.”
“Yum,” Rex mumbled. “Yum-yum!”
A small boy waved his hand wildly. “What do you feed him?”
“Tofu, mostly. It’s good for him.” The teaching cyborg looked at Rex as she spoke, clearly displeased at his thriving upon tofu. “He eats an airtruckload of it every day. Also a great deal of soy protein and bean curd.”
“I’d like to eat the hippos,” Rex told the small boy. “We go right past them every time I take you kids for a ride, and wow! Do they ever look yummy!”
“He’s only joking,” the teaching cyborg told the children. She caught her female attendant’s left arm and held it up to see her watch. “I have a great deal more to tell you, children, but I’ll have to do it while we’re taking our ride, or we’ll fall behind schedule.”
She and her female attendant opened the gate to Rex’s compound and went in, preceded, accompanied, and followed by small girls and boys. While most of the children gathered around him, stroking his rough, thick hide with tentative fingers, the teaching cyborg and her female attendant wrestled a stepladder and a very large howdah of white pentastyrene Wicked wicker from behind Rex’s sleeping shed. For five minutes or more they struggled to hook the howdah over his shoulders and fasten the Velcro cinch, obstructed by the well-intended assistance of four little boys.
Roderick joined them, lifted the howdah into place, and released and refastened the cinch, getting it tight enough that the howdah could not slip to one side.
“Thank you,” the female attendant said. “Haven’t I seen you here before?”
Roderick shook his head. “It’s the first time I’ve ever come.”
“Well, a lot of men do. I mean it’s always just one man all by himself, but there’s almost always one.”
“He used to lie down so that we could put it on him,” the teaching cyborg said severely, “and lie down again so that the children didn’t have to use the ladder. Now he just sits.”
“I’m too fat,” Rex muttered. “It’s all that good tofu I get.”
One by one, the children climbed the ladder, the teaching cyborg’s female attendant standing beside it to catch each if he or she fell, cautioning each to grasp the railings and urging each to belt himself or herself in once he or she had chosen a seat. The teaching cyborg and her female attendant boarded last of all, the teaching cyborg resumed her lecture, and Rex stood up with a groan and began yet again the slow walk around the zoo that he took a dozen times a day.
It had been a fall day, Roderick reminded himself, a fall day bright and clear, a more beautiful day than days ever were now. A stiff, bright wind had been blowing right through all the sunshine. He had worn jeans, a Peoria White Sox cap, and a polka-dot shirt, had kept his airbike low where the wind wasn’t quite so strong, had climbed on Rex’s shoulders and watched as Rex had taken down the bar that held the big doors shut. . . .
“Now,” the teaching cyborg said, “are there any additional questions?” And Roderick looked up just in time to see the corner of the white Wicked wicker howdah vanish behind Rex’s sleeping shed.
“Yes.” He raised his hand. “What became of the boy?”
“The government assumed responsibility for his nurturing and upbringing,” the teaching cyborg explained. “He received sensitivity training and reeducation in societal values and has become a responsible citizen.”
When the teaching cyborg, her female attendant, and all the children had gone, Rex said, “You know, I always wondered what happened to you.”
Roderick mopped his perspiring forehead. “You knew who I was all the time, huh?”
“Sure.”
There was a silence. Far away, as if from another time or another world, children spoke in excited voices and a lion roared. “Nothing happened to me,” Roderick said; it was clearly necessary to say something. “I grew up, that’s all.”
“Those reeducation machines, they really burn it into you. That’s what I heard.”
“No, I grew up. That’s all.”
“I see. Can I ask why you keep lookin’ at me like that?”
“I was just thinking.”
“Thinkin’ what?”
“Nothing.” With iron fists, stone shoulders, and steel-shod feet, words broke down the doors of his heart and forced their way into his mouth. “Your kind used to rule the Earth.”
“Yeah.” Rex nodded. He turned away, leaving Roderick his serpentine tail and wide, ridged back, both the color of a grape skin that has been chewed up and spit out into the dust. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “You too.”
I think I must have taken my mental picture of a boy riding a dinosaur from the Calvin and Hobbes Sunday strip. With it came another picture, one of that same boy grown to manhood staring at his caged dinosaur. Animals in zoos (we are told) believe that their bars protect them. We Americans have forged our own bars, built our own cage, and live in it more or less content as long as someone feeds us.
The Tree Is My Hat
30 Jan. I saw a strange stranger on the beach this morning. I had been swimming in the little bay between here and the village; that may have had something to do with it, although I did not feel tired. Dived down and thought I saw a shark coming around the big staghorn coral. Got out fast. The whole swim cannot have been more than ten minutes. Ran out of the water and started walking.
There it is. I have begun this journal at last. (Thought I never would.) So let us return to all the things I ought to have put in and did not. I bought this the day after I came back from Africa.